Art Cashin, UBS' director of floor operations and a fixture at the New York Stock Exchange for nearly 60 years, died
To explain price discovery, Cashin liked to tell the story of the time the jeweler Charles Lewis Tiffany tried to sell an expensive diamond stickpin to John Pierpont Morgan. He was fond of telling a story about a man who looked at the markets during a national disaster and read the tape in a very different way than everyone else."I was upstairs," Cashin told me,"And the market was selling off. And a broker on the floor, Tommy McKinnon, called up. I was in the order room. And he said, 'Is there anything on the tape about the president?'
"And this guy was a good manager. And he called the salesmen together. And he said, 'Give me a good bullish reason to pull the president out of a parade.' And nobody could think of one. And he said, 'Give me a bearish reason.' Nobody thinks, assassination. They were nowhere near there. They were 10 blocks away. But they start thinking, nuclear catastrophe, natural disaster, blah, blah, blah. They find 100 reasons to sell.
For Cashin, storytelling is only partly about facts: A series of Post-it notes on the wall, each with a separate fact about something going on in the market that day, is not a story. It's how you connect the facts and weave it into a narrative that make it a story. Cashin's secret sauce was a natural gift for telling stories with a"dramatic arc" — that is, stories with rising action, a climax, falling action and a resolution. Even the short Tiffany story contains all these elements: The action rises when Tiffany's man presents the stickpin to Morgan with a $5,000 asking price, and Morgan counters with a $4,000 offer. The climax occurs when Tiffany declines the counteroffer.